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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several features in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

On the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Struggles

She and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Activism

Among the community, art appears the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|